Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon Prime is increasing in price for the first time since 2018. The monthly fee is going up to $15 (previously $13), or $139 per year (previously $119). The higher rates kick in February 18th for new customers, but they won’t take effect for existing customers until they renew March 25th or later. Amazon pinned the increase on the “continued expansion” of Prime perks, like free games through Twitch and pharmacy discounts, along with higher wages (whose wages?) and transportation costs.

On top of that, there are also the company’s big Prime Video projects: the upcoming Lord of the Rings series is expected to cost $465 million just for its first season.

— Mat Smith

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Rotterdam is dismantling a bridge so Jeff Bezos’ superyacht can pass through

But what about the Prime prices?

Getty

Bezos may no longer be the CEO, but the Amazon founder will profit from those price increases. And he has things to spend money on, such as his ostentatious Y721 superyacht. It’s so big that to get it through Rotterdam, the shipbuilder will have to temporarily dismantle part of a bridge. The city is catching some flak over the decision. Koningshaven Bridge, built in 1927, was declared a national monument after it was decommissioned in 1994. The city finished restoring it in 2017 and vowed to never dismantle the bridge again. But here we are.

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Snap is finally making money

Snapchat has more users than ever.

Nearly five years after going public, Snap is finally profitable. The company shared the milestone in its Q4 earnings release, where it reported $23 million in positive net income. Sure, it’s a tiny percentage of its $4.1 billion in quarterly revenue, but it’s an important step for the company that has at times struggled with user growth. Daily active users have now climbed to 319 million.

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EPA objects to US Postal Service plan to buy a new gas-powered delivery fleet

The Biden administration wants zero-emissions mail vehicles.

According to The Washington Post, the Environmental Protection Agency and White House Council on Environmental Quality have sent letters to the US Postal Service urging it to rethink a proposal to mostly buy gas-powered next-gen delivery trucks in a project worth up to $11.3 billion. It said the current strategy is a “lost opportunity” to more drastically reduce the carbon footprint of one of the world’s largest government fleets.

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Canon EOS R3 review

Innovative eye-control focus and speed, for a price.

Engadget

The 24-megapixel, $6,000 EOS R3 is the mirrorless equivalent of Canon’s 1DX Mark III DSLR. It delivers incredible shooting speeds of up to 30 fps, with reliable autofocus that can handle face- and eye-tracking for people and animals. According to Steve Dent, who put the camera through its paces, image quality is the best we’ve seen on any Canon camera. The new eye control AF lets you focus on a subject just by looking at it — something that works well for some people, but not everyone. The R3 is also very strong with video, handling 6K RAW at 60 fps with no overheating issues. The only caveat is that price.

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Ford starts 2022 with its highest EV sales numbers to date

The company is now the number two EV retailer.

Beyond the incredible pre-order numbers for both the hybrid Maverick and the EV F-150 Lightning, Ford’s EV push is working. The company reports sales of its EVs in January “grew almost 4 times faster than the overall electrified segment” (13,169 units in total), making Ford the current number two retailer of electric vehicles in the country behind Tesla, and also making it the country’s top-selling automaker overall. The company sold 6,513 Mavericks in January alone.

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The Switch is now Nintendo’s best-selling home console ever

It just surpassed the Wii with 103.54 million sales since it launched in 2017.

The Nintendo Switch: another success story. It’s now bested the Wii, making it the best-selling home console ever. Thanks to what it called a “good start” by the OLED Switch, it sold 10.67 million units in Q3 (October to December), far surpassing the 3.9 million PS5 units Sony sold. That takes total Switch sales to 103.54 million since it launched in 2017, taking it past the Wii’s lifetime sales of 101.63 million. Having said that, Nintendo revised its yearly forecast down by a million units. It now believes it’ll sell 23 million units, down from the 24 million it forecast last quarter.

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The US Federal Reserve is continuing its research into a “digital dollar” and has unveiled a technical specification for how it might work, The Washington Post has reported. Researchers designed a system that can handle more than 1.7 million transaction a second and settle payments in under two seconds, while operating 24/7 without service outages, according to a new paper on the subject. 

The “Project Hamilton” research into a central bank digital currency (CBDC) was developed strictly to test the feasibility of a digital currency and not to give any recommendations as to whether the Fed should create one. It’s based on the open-source research software OpenCBDC, according to the researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. 

The team said they aimed to solve the technical challenges of an CDBC, while making it flexible, depending on how policymakers decided implement a digital currency. If it was ever adopted, it could allow people who lack bank accounts to gain financial services, while making cross-border payments easier and more secure. The work is still in the early stages, however, and issues like privacy and ease of exchange with foreign currencies still need to be studied. 

The Federal Reserve has been publicly investigating a digital currency for just a short time, having announced plans to carry out research in May of last year. The US has been behind other nations, particularly China, with the development of digital currencies. Central banks control CBDCs, making them more stable than cryptocurrencies, which can have wild swings in value over short periods of time. 

Last month, the Fed released a study detailing the pros and cons of a central bank currency. It deliberately avoided taking a stance on whether it should pursue the technology, as any such decision would be made by Congress and other policymakers. Rather, it focused on the potential benefits and pitfalls. It said on the one hand that a digital currency could make financial services more inclusive, but also warned that it would need to protect privacy, guard against financial crimes and be resilient. 

Along with the results, the researchers have open-source code for the platform, with the aim of gaining input from the public. “There are still many remaining challenges in determining whether or how to adopt a central bank payment system for the United States,” said MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative director Neha Narula. 

Twitter’s platform has always been about microblogging, where users post their thoughts within a fixed number of characters or less. This is the perfect tool for delivering your ideas or just thoughts that pop into your head, but what if you have something longer that you want to say?

Usually in these cases, Twitter users have to either link users to a different website like Medium, or write their post down in another app, take a screenshot, and then upload it as a photos. However, that could change soon according to researcher Jane Manchun Wong who discovered that Twitter could be working on letting users post long form articles.

There’s gonna be lots of potentials with Twitter Articles, off the top of my head:

– @SuperFollows-exclusive articles

– newsletter + in-app UX + on-platform conversation

– syndicated articles (by news sites) + news-reading subscription model (via a premium Twitter Blue tier) https://t.co/tWNp0SqWc8

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 3, 2022

According to the post, it shows that Twitter is working on something called “Twitter Articles”. While it does not say what it does, it has been speculated that this is where Twitter could allow users to post long form articles within their own profile and on Twitter’s platform. So instead of driving users to another website, Twitter could use it to keep users using their platform instead.

This could also work in the favor of creators who might have generated a large following on Twitter, so instead of trying to persuade their followers to visit a different website, keeping it within Twitter could see creators leverage their followers. There is no word on when the feature will be released, so we’ll just have to wait.

Twitter Could Soon Let Users Post Articles Directly On Its Platform

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